http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
PARIS |
"This is not Warsaw, this is not Sarajevo," declared the
French TV commentator. "Hard as it may be to believe,
this is New York!"

For Europeans, as well as for Asians and Africans, the
view of a panic-stricken America under warlike siege is
an unimaginable nightmare. "It's like some paperback
novel, a Hollywood movie," said a customer at a café on
Paris' famed Champs-Elysées as he watched a TV screen
showing a World Trade Center tower collapsing.

Yesterday's horrifying events in New York and Washington
have gripped the French capital and the rest of the
world like few events of recent years. In London's
financial center, shaken traders spoke of being in phone
contact with colleagues at the World Trade
Center. "Suddenly," reported one man, his voice
trembling, "the lines just went dead."

European television, which rarely breaks into programs
for news bulletins, devoted nonstop hours to live
coverage of the chaotic events at the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, coverage that continued hour by hour
well into the night.

PRIME SUSPECT
As in the United States, speculation in Europe and
elsewhere has focused on Afghanistan-based terror
mastermind Osama Bin Laden. But the speculation is
educated. Philippe Hassam, an Islam expert in Paris,
asks: "Who else but Bin Laden would have had the global
mechanism to organize such an attack?"

Hassam points out that, as Adolf Hitler did in "Mein
Kampf," Bin Laden has already laid out his plans to "hit
the United States" in most everything he has every
written.

But other European terrorism experts believe that even
Bin Laden could not have carried out the air attacks all
by himself. "I would say that we might take a careful
look at what involvement Saddam Hussein and Iraq may
have had in these events," suggests one German security
official.

America's terrorist Pearl Harbor also provoked sharp
foreign defensive reaction. In London, Prime Minister
Tony Blair canceled all flights into London's three
major airports. In Paris, President Jacques Chirac, who
spoke of "acts of war," gave orders to launch France's
Vigipirate Plan, an intensive anti-terrorism program
recently prepared by the French secret service.

In Brussels, NATO commanders announced plans to hyper-
increase their normal levels of alert. In Germany, major
national monuments, including Berlin's Grand Synagogue,
were placed under double guard.

And Israel, always on the alert for possible terrorist
attacks, closed its airspace to all but flights of El
Al, its national carrier, then later announced that it
was sealing its land borders with Egypt and Jordan - its
only direct links to the Arab world.

DAMAGED REPUTATION
Alain Richard, the French minister of defense, said, "We
must all take this as an attack and a threat against us
as well. Anything less would be foolhardy."

The attacks also have dealt a heavy blow to American
intelligence credibility. As one senior official at the
Quai d'Orsay, France's state department, put it, "How
could it be that with all the millions that the CIA, the
FBI and the Pentagon spend on intelligence, that no one
had any idea that such a series of attacks were planned?

"What happened to airport security? What happened to
America's
invincibility?"